Drac crash my servers!

[Terje Bless]

Stuart_Hayes at dell.com wrote:

>Are you using ide-scsi for the DRAC virtual CD-ROM device?  The ide-cd
>driver can fail when a DRAC4 reset occurs.  You can read about this issue
>at this link (look for "DRAC4 Virtual CDROM Reset May Cause System
>Instability" on page 17):

And what is the status of getting this issue fixed? Or worked-around by default?

I'm still not entirely clear on whether this is a Dell issue, a Red Hat issue,
an upstream kernel.org/IDE issue, or if the blame spreads evenly; but this
really needs to get fixed so that either IDE Hotplug works (i.e. doesn't bring
down the system) or the DRAC4 Virtual Devices get assigned to the ide-scsi
driver by default (e.g. by blacklist or whitelist for one driver or the other).

Whomever takes the root cause blame on this one, it's a problem that takes down
Enterprise Dell systems en masse so IMO it behooves Dell to push to get this
fixed.

This can't wait for kernel.org to implement IDE Hotplug and the resulting kernel
to trickle out into a distribution (i.e. RHEL5 at the earliest). If no better
solution exists then Dell needs to get Red Hat to modify Anaconda (RHEL
installer) so it adds "hde=ide-scsi hdf=ide-scsi" to the grub.conf kernel line
on PowerEdge systems with a DRAC4 installed.



-- 
  «Terje, you are a sick and twisted individual, and I
   think I speak for all of us when I say, “Thank you!”»

               -- John Gruber <gruber at barebones.com>